The coast was blanketed in a 2,500 foot deep low cloud layer, but this part of the Big Sur coastline bends to the east just south of Carmel allowing holes to develop in the fog. That allowed the light to cast itself across the beach and mountains one hour before sunset. I had originally planned to shoot at another location, but it was fogged in so I went to where the light was.I wanted to catch the waves just at the split second when the light shone through, revealing the color of the water. The angle of the light enabled the texture of the rock face and sand to show up clearly. The softness of the light allowed me to have the wave paint itself onto the image with an exposure time just long enough to show some movement without losing a sense of the direction of motion. A ½ second exposure would have looked rather messy and a 1/20 second exposure would have frozen the wave in place.